By Chad Love

A couple weeks back I asked readers for suggestions on how to convince a significant other that you need a new pup. Incidentally, the photo that accompanies that blog is my little setter, Jenny, when she was eight weeks old. I can't say that I actually tried using any of your fine and varied suggestions, but obviously I did something right, or at least not catastrophically wrong, as here I am again, for better or worse, with a new pup.

Meet Insert Name Here (we'll get to that in a minute). He's a precocious, long-legged, raw-boned little cutie of an English setter from Berg Brothers Kennel in Dayton, Minnesota. In this picture he's giving the stink-eye to a prairie chicken wing, but when I picked him up from the airport Friday, he was alternately charming everyone at the cargo dock (when they were paying attention to him) and splitting their eardrums with howls of pure anguish (when they weren't).

By Chad Love

A few weeks ago, I was out doing a little training with my graying, soon-to-be nine-year-old chessie. We were working on long blinds (something she's never really excelled at). As she began to drift off the line I had sent her on, I gave her a sit whistle, which she ignored as if she hadn't heard it.

"That's not like her," I thought as I gave her another, louder whistle, which she promptly obeyed as she usually does. I knew she probably hadn't heard that first whistle, but at the time I chalked it up to the distance involved, the fact that we were working into a stiff, howling wind and a somewhat wimpy first whistle blast on my part.
 
But maybe she didn't hear me because, well, she's slowly going deaf? Many of us probably don't give much thought to our dogs' hearing, but considering how often their ears are subjected to close-range shotgun blasts, maybe we should. In a bit of serendipity, not long after I began wondering about my old dog's hearing loss, I received an e-mail from Phil Bourjaily alerting me to the existence of a product I must admit I never knew existed.

By Chad Love

As I stand in my driveway slowly sipping coffee, I hear a faint sound far above my head, a familiar trilling cry that on this warm spring morning is pure auditory sunshine. A ragged, undulating V of sandhill cranes winging north along an invisible trail seen only by them. If air currents could show ruts, how deep would they be from the eons of their passing?

I hear memory and time and forever itself distilled in that haunting call. The descriptive word for how I feel is "Zugunruhe", and simply put, it is an innate restlessness, an instinctive urge to move with the seasons.

We all possess it on some primordial level, but shackled by circumstance, most of us long ago turned a deaf ear to its call. But when I hear the sandhills floating overhead it always stirs something inside me, a migration of the state of mind if not the body, a transition from the brooding introspection of late winter to the hope and exuberance of spring.

By Chad Love

I was browsing YouTube recently when I came across a video from Berg Bros setters in Minnesota (you may remember Berg. Bros. from my blog post on tips for buying a started dog). The video shows a five-month-old Berg Bros setter pup absolutely steady to wing on a flushed bird. It was a pretty amazing video for a dog so young, so I called up Scott Berg to ask him about it, and as I do every time I talk to a knowledgeable dog trainer, managed to learn something in spite of myself.

"Well, that was an unusual situation," says Berg, "And I'd caution anyone not to push for this type of result so early, or to even try this with a pup that young, but I had worked this pup on whoa, both on the bench, and playing fetch. I'd mix in whoa while playing retrieve. I'd throw a ball, then gently restrain him while saying whoa. When he was steady for a bit, I'd release him. It was a fun game and the retrieve was his reward. You want to make it fun for the dog. Keeping it fun is very important, and letting them learn on their own with wild birds or strong flying liberated birds."